The snow is thick and crunchy under our feet.  It’s the kind of snow you rest on top of, popping through only occasionally where the snow stayed soft and safe from freezing rain.  The wind is sharp and painful.  The sky alternates between bluebird blue with cracks of sun reaching our cheeks and misty gray delivering impending doom.  It’s still february.  Hardly, but it still is.

So, despite this knowledge, we hoped for more.  Three weeks until the equinox yet, but we thought perhaps, just perhaps, there was a sign of spring awaiting us out our back door.  So we bundled and we searched.

But it was all in vain.  We came up empty-handed, the groundhog was correct, Jack Frost’s grip is still tight upon us.  Even the chickadees were absent from our pine/hemlock forest for in the distance some large construction trucks were scaring them all away.  (Sure, I know they are around, I have seen them! Oh wait… they don’t migrate… but darn it if a tiny tweet wouldn’t have made us feel somewhat successful.)

A bit of browned moss at the base of a tree, some baby pinecones and papa pinecones, twigs and fireworks of pine needles and a turned over frosty was all we were able to turn up. Oh winter, your beauty is grand and your season is king in this country.  But you have proven your point!  Step aside!

But, lucky for me, the little boys in my life seem not to notice or mind the length and severity of this season.  Life is grand for them all the same.

  Take heart mama.  Take heart.